


Stages Of Light

by fallingvoices



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Journalism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Miscommunication Issues, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 07:58:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingvoices/pseuds/fallingvoices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finding themselves alone in a hotel room in Prague, Enjolras and Grantaire try to find new ways of communicating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stages Of Light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [abp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abp/gifts).



> This fic underwent a strange evolution where it went from ensemble Christmas fluff to a tropey roadtrip and eventually became a porny tête-tête about two people stuck in a hotel room together for a week. I set out to write something light-hearted and fun, and then I started thinking about how these two can't communicate for shit, and then I was writing another story altogether. I hope you enjoy it anyway.
> 
> The journalism setting is only incidental to the story — it's less the focus of the fic than a way to get them there.

All in all, Grantaire's contribution to the trip lasts exactly twenty seconds: he introduces Enjolras to his contact, two hours after landing in Prague; then Enjolras leaves to do whatever it is investigative journalists do, presumably to parlay with his source, and Grantaire finds a bar.

Their hotel room is a small, dank affair, but discreet, and the mini-fridge is stocked full. The twin beds are tiny, though: by the time Enjolras returns at dinnertime Grantaire has already tried to take a power nap and fallen off three times, which, okay — and is growing increasingly churlish.

"We'll push them together," Enjolras says. He looks tired. Exhaustion is not a good look on Enjolras — Enjolras is ceaseless and unbending at the best of times, but the week has been a long one, and the only reason Grantaire is the one at his side at the moment, instead of Courfeyrac or Combeferre, is that Grantaire knows more people in Prague than all of the ABC combined. Even now, though, the hotel room seems too small for him, and Enjolras himself — leaving his jacket in a heap on the saggy mattress, pushing his hair back from his face — all the more implausible for the humanity in that tiredness.

At nine, as promised, they call the paper, and watch the whole of the ABC pile up on the other end of the line, the crap wi-fi connection making the image crackle and the sound lag off three seconds behind. But their friends' faces are bright and cheerful, alight with the late hour and the fact that the current UMP candidate for Mayor of Paris has apparently managed to get herself exposed in an embezzlement scandal in the twenty-four hours since they've left France, which means _copy_. Soon enough Enjolras will be taking over the screen, hashing out strategies and coverage with Feuilly and Combeferre, but for now Grantaire leans back against the headboard and watches Bossuet and Joly and Prouvaire, feeling burned-out from too much alcohol, from Enjolras's proximity, the warmth of him against his side.

The ABC is a young web paper, barely half a decade old, with more doting godparents than it needs to stay afloat, but not too many connections that they can't afford to gain more. Otherwise Enjolras would be on a plane or a train back to Paris within the hour, and Grantaire — well, Grantaire would probably kick around Prague some more, go to a nightclub, get himself laid. The Parisian clubs have lost their shine after a while. 

On the screen Courfeyrac succeeds to Combeferre, his handsome, cheerful face a little lined from the strain, but endlessly fond as he looks at them. From this close, Grantaire can feel the tension seeping from Enjolras's shoulders, the exhaustion cresting, and Enjolras coming out the other side more certain and more formidable. They're similar in this, if in nothing else. Their friends are their beacon in the dark, the warm place they keep coming back to, and the broad, sprawling apartment their offices are in, overlooking the Seine, are as familiar and as genuine a home as the Musain was in their university days.

Enjolras was born later than he should have, maybe. He hails from an ideal long shriveled — and, from within, revives it. Enjolras was made for revolutions, for a call to arms that can only be resolved between trigger and bullet, only the spark that soars between the two, and folds in on itself, consuming its own energy. He is a few centuries shy of the right moment. Still, Enjolras puts all of his strength and his thoughts to the task, denies himself indulgences and kindnesses, lives for little more than his burning faith, and only puts his trust in those he surrounds himself with. It's a mystery to Grantaire that he was ever allowed there — that Enjolras trusts him enough to let him stay, if not to let him do more for the paper than a few satirical doodles, and to call up old acquaintances in Eastern Europe to arrange a meeting.

That night they call up room service and eat with their fingers on the unmade bed, then go to sleep with four inches of empty air between them. Enjolras sleeps silent and straight-backed, like a recumbent effigy in Notre Dame, and Grantaire sprawls, kicks out in dreaming, and wakes with his face pushed against Enjolras's shoulder.

 

*

 

Prague is cold and bright-lit in the winter, and the evening comes on fast, like a dog with its tongue lolling after the sun. Grantaire putters around the arcades and the shops for the better part of the afternoon, then comes home early to a burger and fries in the hotel bistro. The bedroom is empty. He slinks into the shower, washes off the grime of five hours spent through the streets, and whiles away a couple of hours on the bed thumbing through a battered paperback picked up in the city.

Grabbing the early shower, though, means that when Enjolras returns from his own shower — having apparently come back in sometime in the interval — he is wet-haired and in a soft, grey v-neck that probably belonged to Courfeyrac before he appropriated it, and he awakens Grantaire from a slight, blissful doze by sitting up in bed with his laptop, apparently intent on blasting out the first draft of a full article. Grantaire has been dreaming of something soft and cool, and finds his cock grown half-full against his leg when Enjolras jostles him awake.

Ten minutes later, it hasn't abated. It doesn't help that the bed is warm, and the mattress deep, and the domesticity of the scene all the more appealing that it's completely flawed. Enjolras wears reading glasses. Grantaire knew that, technically.

He reaches his hand down as quietly as he can, presses it against his cock underneath the duvet. Then he forgets to take it away. He's hard as a rock; when he pushes his face back against the pillow, the fabric feels cool against his skin. 

"You can, if you must," Enjolras says, without looking at him. "I don't care."

Grantaire breathes out. Enjolras is very close, but the proximity is a question of necessity, not one of acceptance. Though he's half-turned away, he can make out the shapes and lines of his body, the long clever hands on the keyboard, the blur of his hair against the lamplight. For a minute he doesn't do anything at all: waits for Enjolras to glance at him, for that sharp attention to turn to him instead. It doesn't. 

He's still hazy with sleep, which is all the justification he has for the way he watches Enjolras from beneath his eyelids as he starts to jerk off, every minute movement of his arm amplified underneath the blankets. His hand feels raw, cold-roughened against his cock, and for a minute he's able to imagine that it is Enjolras's hand, the coarseness of his own skin spiraling into metaphors: Enjolras's indifference, that stinging unresponsiveness, grasping and pulling at him until his eyes close to preserve the picture. 

It splinters, though, when Enjolras's hand falls to his hair — doesn't sink in, doesn't tangle, but touches — and Grantaire whines and jerks and comes, sudden and fierce, pressing his face against Enjolras's thigh. He gasps out hard, heaving gasps, barely aware of anything other than his own orgasm, the spasm and release of his muscles, the angry breaths careening up from his lungs. Drowsiness grasps at him, makes him sink into the warmth and darkness of the bed.

Shame is quick on its heels. It's one thing jerking one off in the shower to the thought of Enjolras's mouth, and another to pull it out against his thigh. He wonders if Enjolras will elect to ignore it, whether he has even recognized it; not innocence but disinterest, Grantaire's pleasure and rising self-disgust something barely even to be witnessed before it is forgotten. Still, Enjolras's hand is in his hair. It rises and falls with Grantaire's breathing, the only movement to Enjolras's very, very still body.

Looking up, Enjolras seems, for a moment, cast in a de La Tour painting, all shadows and backlight. Grantaire follows that line down to the focal point, over his shoulder and into his lap, and pauses. 

"Enjolras," he says, rasps, the name in his mouth like a sun star, and pushes his face against Enjolras's thigh, inches away from where Enjolras's erection is straining the fabric of his trousers.

"Don't waste my time," Enjolras says, shortly. 

He wonders what it might be like, to peel away the layer of Enjolras's underwear and fit his mouth around Enjolras's dick; to suck him off until Enjolras puts away the laptop and puts his hands into Grantaire's hair — thinks, as well, of Enjolras taking no notice of him, and coming in his mouth without a hitch in his typing. 

After a moment he rolls away again, swaddles himself up in blankets, and goes to sleep.

 

*

 

The third day Grantaire spends rambling about the city and bored out of his skull. Enjolras doesn't return to the hotel room until late in the evening, when Grantaire is shaving in front of the bathroom mirror; after four beers it'd seemed like a good idea, although now his hands are trembling and his neck already nicked in two places. He's cursing up a storm and peeling off his shirt, now smudged with blood, juggling bottle and razor, half of his face and throat still white with lather; then turns his back to the mirror and sees Enjolras in the next room, through the open doorway.

Enjolras's lips twitch. It isn't one of his expressions at all — it's one of Combeferre's instead, the same fond wryness teetering on the edge of dry wit. Then he shifts, steps forward into the bathroom, and the shitty light falls on him a different way, and he's all Enjolras again — hard angles and shadows, _grand ange au front d'airain_ , etcetera.

"Your hands are shaking," he tells Grantaire. It throws him off; Enjolras normally hates stating the obvious. 

Then Enjolras is close again. He takes the razor from Grantaire's swaying hand, and maneuvers him towards the sink, where Grantaire goes pliant, staggering. Enjolras's fingers touch his left cheek, close-shaven and still a little damp with soap, then down to tip up his chin. Enjolras pulls and pushes at him, shapes him where he wants him, and Grantaire — a little befuddled, wanting to start up a speech, and for once wrung clean out of words — goes. The arc lamp above the mirror makes a dirty golden ring around them.

"Do you even shave, Enjolras?" Grantaire blurts, unbidden; his old damn tongue. Enjolras pulls back from where he was dipping the razor in the lukewarm water in the sink, and looks at him, expressionless for a moment.

"… Right," says Grantaire.

"Yes," Enjolras says, dry as good wine. 

"Right," says Grantaire again. "Only Saint Michael —"

"I thought last night showed I'm not as sexless as you'd like to make me," Enjolras says, his face set, so Grantaire shuts up, stops trying to put words to the situation. He could shape similes and allegories by the dozen to explain what's happening now, and none of them would come close to making any of this any clearer. 

Enjolras scrapes the razor against his cheek slowly and firmly, and the fingers of his other hand press against the side of Grantaire's neck, angling it up. This close, Grantaire can see every depression in his skin, the small scar that runs white and thin just underneath his jaw, and the place where his hair curls slightly behind his earlobe. 

It's nothing like last night: Enjolras was statuesque and immeasurably distant then, more aloof figure than real person, and now he — isn't. Now he reciprocates. Putting a name to it is startling, as though Grantaire hadn't been able to expect that. Which he hadn't, really. 

Enjolras doesn't normally prevaricate, and he doesn't actively do so now: he finishes up Grantaire's face with quick, efficient gestures, then taps his jaw, his pale eyes looking up through long lashes. They're of a height, and this close Enjolras's breath is steady, cooling against Grantaire's wet skin. Grantaire swallows, feels his own pulse beat against Enjolras's warm, dry hand. 

He gives that measure too, tips his head back and exposes his throat — it isn't a question, never was, but it makes something in Enjolras's face change. The touch of the razor is cold and alarming for the two seconds it takes until that, too, becomes something Grantaire would give Enjolras if asked; except now he is asked, apparently. 

When he looks at the mirror afterwards, his face washed and dry, he looks younger, like a stranger, or an old photograph from his Beaux-Arts days. Enjolras watches him, too. 

 

*

 

He wakes up in the middle of the third night. The duvet is heavy on top of him, pulled almost up to his face. It's too warm there, his stale breath returning to him in the close, confined space, and it takes him a moment to recognize the hot, tense body resting against his side, to blink and turn his head and find Enjolras on the adjacent pillow, his pale eyes half-lidded with sleep. Enjolras is hard — Grantaire can feel his erection, the sudden unexpected burn of it against his thigh as they wake against each other. He shifts, pushes back, and sees Enjolras shudder, feels Enjolras's boxers caught between their legs.

"Can't sleep," he says, the half-assed justification rough and hushed in the dark. Enjolras blinks at him, slow and sluggish, still half-asleep. There is a strange intimacy to the position that hasn't been there before, not during the two nights they've shared the bed, and Enjolras's hand is near his throat, brushing the skin there. Strands of Enjolras's hair are touching his mouth — he hasn't noticed, on waking, that Enjolras's chest is flush against his side, and that it is Enjolras who's moved closer while asleep. Perhaps they both have. It makes the moment feel off-kilter and precarious, as though they have gone off a script they didn't quite know existed, and have found their way here on accident.

Then the drowsy malleability fades from Enjolras's features, smoothed out and gone, and he drives himself up onto his elbow, puts his hand to the pillow and pushes himself above Grantaire, and looks down. After a while his face slackens, the corners of his mouth gone soft with something like acknowledgement.

"You're still drunk," he asks, only the lilting rise of the last syllable marking the question.

"Nope," Grantaire croaks, truthfully enough. He's three hours past his latest beer and just on the wrong side of sober. His mouth tastes dreadful, but when Enjolras reaches for him, he opens it for him all the same.

They bring each other off with clean, long strokes. Enjolras's cock beneath the fabric of his underwear is a hot, heavy line, and when Grantaire's wrist brushes it Enjolras shapes his mouth into new sounds against the hollow of Grantaire's throat; in his hand it's hotter still, curved against his palm. The first stroke pulls a groan from Enjolras that shakes something loose in Grantaire's ribcage.

After a few minutes of this, the two of them moving together in the dark, Enjolras's hands move from where they have been pinned to Grantaire's hips, and down, and _behind_ , then grasp the flesh of his buttocks and pull him firmly close. It is — startlingly intimate, devastatingly so, and Grantaire's hips pulse once, unrelenting and involuntary, against Enjolras's — he feels Enjolras's bare cock slip between his clenched thighs, below the line of his own briefs, and very nearly comes on the spot. He can't breathe, but Enjolras pulls his mouth against his again, and that is breath enough.

He struggles for a moment, to pull off his underwear; they manhandle each other back into position afterwards, Enjolras already half on top of him, until they can stroke each other simultaneously, and choke their own moans into warm, bare skin. Enjolras kisses him with a ferocity Grantaire normally associates with corruption scandals and elective disasters: with one hand at his jaw, holding his mouth open. He tries some new things, works Grantaire a little faster, and groans to find the rhythm repeated on him.

Enjolras comes with Grantaire's name half-formed in his mouth, and Grantaire sets his hand on his cheek and kisses it off of him. In his half-languid state he thinks it feels like stealing a psalm from a priest, like laughter, like devotion.

 

*

 

Somehow, the next afternoon, Enjolras finds him in a café near the river. Grantaire, in a fit of self-denial, has foregone alcohol and elected to stay in and drink coffee until he can properly process the events of the previous night or until the apocalypse cometh, whichever happens first; Enjolras's materialization beside his table is unsettling, to say the least.

"Can I sit down?" Enjolras asks, in his brusque manner. His dark coat and thick scarf make him look like a Russian spy from some 1950s Hollywood movie.

"I believe you can do anything you set your mind to," Grantaire says, snappish, but Enjolras sits without taking notice of his tone. The café is ancient in style, and Enjolras's honey-coloured hair and pale eyes fit in well with the copper, golden tones of the wooden walls. He folds his hands on the table like he is reluctant to use them.

"You left before I woke up this morning."

"I didn't think you'd have much to say to me."

Enjolras cuts through that particular attempt at equivocation. "I did. I wanted to talk to you."

"Okay," says Grantaire, who knows what kind of conversation is coming now. "Tell me, then, I have good money on this — did Coureyrac or Lesgle have to tell you, or did you, did you figure it out on your own —"

"You're assuming you've been subtle all these years," Enjolras says, dryly. His lips press in a flat line. "You," he says, then stops. It's unnerving. "You frustrate me, and I don't know what to say to you. We keep having two different conversations at the same time."

Well, yeah, Grantaire thinks. "Well, yeah."

They rarely talk like this. Grantaire talks too much at any given time, and Enjolras is taciturn and declamatory in turns — Grantaire swallows it all, eating his own words like a titan, and Enjolras is a firm, fixed point, sober and single-focused and ungiving in the face of Grantaire's grandiloquence. 

When he tries explaining that, though, the whole thing falls apart — which he guesses is the point, in a nutshell. They don't talk right. 

"Devotion only sounds right in Latin. Most of us mortals don't speak dead languages," Grantaire tells him, still smiling, mostly sardonic. Enjolras just looks blank: his good little Catholic bourgeois education is something he's discarded years ago, at the same time as he abjured, apparently, committed relationships, and also capitalism. Grantaire switches tacks. "In Delphi —" 

"Spare me the mythology, Grantaire."

"In Delphi," Grantaire pushes on, "they sat the oracle on a tripod over a hole in the earth, from which came fumes. Scribes translated her ravings into poetry, and afterwards priests made them into prophesies — so people came to ask after the harvest, or the health of their prime ox, or the marriageability of their daughter, and what they got back was verse, which carried a truth, only they couldn't decode it by themselves. Translation was a noble art then, you see. I guess she was just stoned out of her skull," he adds, and the pretty little speech collapses on its own head.

Enjolras digests this, looking vaguely bored. "Should I translate your ravings, then?"

"You'll find them lacking completely in substance, I'm afraid. I'm better off living my days in a barrel, eating raw fish and masturbating." That new analogy is rather pleasing, and Grantaire latches onto it with relish. "And you're Alexander, standing in the way of the sun."

Enjolras's face seizes briefly with irritation. Grantaire wants to soothe it away, and savour knowing that he made it happen. It's an indulgently self-contradictory feeling.

The point: Grantaire doesn't know if they can talk about normal things, together, the way he does with Joly, or Bahorel, and presumably the way Enjolras does with Combeferre or Prouvaire or Courfeyrac, or really anyone in their tight-knit circle that isn't Grantaire. Grantaire has known him for years, and still he can't imagine Enjolras chatting about tonight's football match the way normal blokes do at a bar, or about — casting about for markers of normalcy, which are unsurprisingly scarce in their entangled lives — about the cut of a fine suit, or the curve of a painter's brush. Enjolras speaks golden words, brilliant words, made to inspire and arouse the hearts of men. Grantaire's mostly happy to complain about rush hour at Châtelet. 

But intimacy breeds some complicity, and now Enjolras's touch on his arm, the angle of his mouth, the slope of his throat have become a form of language, too — a silent, uncomplicated one, which attempting to talk through would only muddle further. 

After a minute, Enjolras's hand slips down to his. It's long, and bony, and very hot, as though the fervor that flares through him is heat under his skin. He grasps Grantaire's hand hard, fits his fingers against his, as though to shape the air between them, to give it meaning.

"I rutted against your leg like a bitch dog in heat," says Grantaire, finally giving in to clarity, and all the ugliness and petty self-disgust of the day before staging a return in his gut.

"I was working," Enjolras says.

Which Grantaire can understand, a little. Enjolras's devotion to his cause is about the hottest damn thing about him. Still, the curve of his mouth just at that moment is something new.

"Did you get off to it afterwards?" he asks, suddenly delighted, and fearless in the delight. "Did you wait until I was asleep to sneak to the bathroom and jacked off thinking about ignoring me while I —"

"No," Enjolras cuts in. Then, quieter: "I wanted to. I wasn't expecting that."

"Okay," says Grantaire, who doesn't quite know what to say to that.

"I want to," Enjolras says.

"Okay," says Grantaire, and though Enjolras doesn't smile, his hand tightens around Grantaire's fingers, firm and warm.

 

*

 

They take the tram on the way back to the hotel room. Enjolras leans against the window, his eyes half-closed, one gloved hand still around Grantaire's wrist. Sometimes his thumb strokes the pad of Grantaire's thumb; mostly it's tucked against his palm. Grantaire holds back, their single point of contact, watching the holiday decorations outside leave stained-glass shadows on Enjolras's face.

Enjolras kisses him against the bedroom door, holding his jaw firm and his mouth open. As kisses go it's somewhat an awkward one, too deep and too wet and too good to last very long. When they surface from it Enjolras's hair is mussed under Grantaire's hands, and his mouth swollen, shiny from Grantaire's mouth.

"You look indecent," Grantaire tells him, and Enjolras looks vaguely pleased. He steers them towards the bed, intent on pulling off Grantaire's jacket, on getting his chilled hands on the skin underneath. Once he succeeds, Grantaire muffles restless cackling into his warm, smooth neck, and then kisses him again, working at Enjolras's belt.

"Your fingers," Enjolras tells him, once they're naked and have made a thorough mess of the duvet and pillows, have retreated underneath it to stroke the cold bare skin between each other's thighs. He catches them there, pulls them farther down.

"I have ten. What of them?"

"Put them in me."

It startles laughter out of Grantaire's throat: of course Enjolras, faced with the certainty of sex, would meet it head-on and without shame. One of Enjolras's arms is loped around his shoulder, and Grantaire dips his head to touch his mouth to the soft inner skin above his armpit, then lower, against his ribcage.

There's lube in the bedside table, the seal unbroken; Grantaire carries some around in his duffel bag, but that's all the way across the room in the closet, and Enjolras is too warm underneath him. He goes slow, at first, cataloguing: Enjolras's thigh up on his shoulder, the fine touch of his leg hair, the hard, hungry opening of his body underneath Grantaire's fingers. Grantaire puts his mouth around one of Enjolras's balls, sucks lightly, and Enjolras sighs, takes a second finger.

"God," Enjolras says around a groan, and the third finger. "Ah."

"Good?"

"Yes. Don't stop."

Grantaire couldn't if he tried. Enjolras's body moves above and under him like a tall ship, one hand flat against the headboard, the other tight in a fist against his thigh.

"I didn't think you'd done this."

"Fingered myself?" From down below the duvet, Enjolras's face is a blur of gold, tossed about the pillow.

"Been fucked."

"I'm not one of your Roman statues, Grantaire."

Grantaire exhales; it feels, and sounds, like the air is just punched out of him. The inside of Enjolras's body is a red furnace. His thighs have a vibration to them.

"No," he agrees, putting his other hand around Enjolras's cock, where it fits hot and eager. Enjolras's fingers grapple into his hair. "Your dick's too big for that," he adds, unable to check himself, but Enjolras's gasp is half full of laughter; it's perhaps the first time Enjolras has ever truly laughed at something Grantaire's said, and the knowledge of it sinks into his bones, a new kind of warmth.

"Do you wanna fuck me," he says finally, and Enjolras's eyes slit open.

"I thought," he says, then stops. His throat works, slick and golden even in the shitty lamplight, but it isn't indecision; it's consideration, attention given over entirely to thought. Then: "yes." A pause. "If you want."

"I want," Grantaire says, and eases his fingers out. It's easier being carved open for Enjolras than to demand that much intimacy from him, and he doesn't like seeing Enjolras uncertain. When Enjolras pushes himself shakily up he sets a hand against his neck and kisses him; Enjolras's mouth is lush and warm, and from underneath his lashes Grantaire sees that his eyes are open, bright-edged in the bedside light. They watch each other like this, close and naked and sitting almost between each other's legs, until Enjolras bends his long neck, kisses him harder. Grantaire cants them back down against the pillows.

It feels less complicated, this way around — Grantaire content to lie back and do piss-all, and Enjolras above him, quick and efficient in the preparation. It's awkward, in places, but then Enjolras smooths his palm down Grantaire's side when his legs seize up, when his face catches in a grimace — and Grantaire breathes out, forces himself to relax. It's been a while, and Enjolras's fingers are long and sure. They touch in places that haven't been touched in months.

"Alright?" Enjolras asks once. Grantaire nods, shakily, and when Enjolras brushes his mouth against the inside of his knee it's such a surprise he nearly kicks him in the face.

"Come on," he says. He's barely opened up yet, but he likes the burn. Somehow Enjolras understands, though: he watches Grantaire's face carefully for a moment, then his other hand is moving from his hip down to his thigh, fingers digging in hard into the flesh there. He's sitting between Grantaire's spread legs, the comforter falling off his back almost the exact same shade as his hair, and when he kneels up he presses his hand flat against Grantaire's abdomen, pushes at him until they're both exactly right. Grantaire pulls up one leg around him, palms at Enjolras's hip and backside and urges him down until Enjolras's body gives, sinks forwards.

Then Enjolras is inside him, gradually, careful but unstopping, and Grantaire has been terribly wrong.

He should have shifted them both around, should have put himself on his hands and knees and let Enjolras kiss the knobs of his spine, but not look at him while he fucks him; he's assumed that being fucked would be easier to deal with than to be inside Enjolras, and most likely to go to pieces there. He's assumed that being fucked would mean he was the one exposed — physicality bleeding over — but now, astoundingly, Enjolras's mouth is open and his eyes clear, and he's breathing, they're both breathing badly.

His cock is hot, feels larger than it really is, and burns high into places that feel strained and stretched for the first time. Once he is pulled fully in they mark a pause, Enjolras's hand braced taut and hard against the hollow of Grantaire's thighs — thumbs just shy of Grantaire's perineum, stroking the thin, soft skin there with what feels strangely like reverence. Enjolras's face is set, though, his eyes serious and guarded, watching Grantaire warily.

He can't kiss him like this, his arms are shaking too hard, though it would be easier, to close his eyes and open his mouth and escape that burning scrutiny. All that grace and energy still directed to a single focus, but the focus has shifted — has settled in the vicinity of Grantaire's ribcage, rather than below the waist, where Grantaire has intended it. He can't read Enjolras's face at all. 

"Come on," Grantaire says again. 

Enjolras moves slow at first, then with more certainty of what Grantaire can take, what he can give. After a while every thrust of Enjolras's hips knocks the breath out of Grantaire's lungs — he goes deep, neglecting finesse or foreplay, opting instead for steady, heavy thrusts. His back arches low with every one of them, his face close to Grantaire's throat, near enough that Grantaire feels immersed, sinking, pressed down into the warmth of the bed by the warmth of Enjolras's chest and thighs and shoulders. 

The rhythm falters a little when Enjolras draws back a fraction, puts his hand to Grantaire's throat, and kisses him a little messily — less out of a real desire to kiss, Grantaire guesses, but because kissing is symmetrical just then, makes a circle. Enjolras enjoys equality in all things.

When he pulls out of it Grantaire draws after him, kisses him twice more, closed-mouthed. Enjolras slams a hand next to his head, on the pillow, the better to push into him, and this time the expression on his face is clear and palpable. It makes something in Grantaire's chest seize.

He can take easy dismissal from Enjolras, could take caution, could take even vulnerability, in the way his shoulderblades feel clean and cold and smooth under Grantaire's palms; but tenderness is something new. It isn't gentleness, which in Enjolras's body is an inconceivable emotion — it isn't even kindness, his palm splayed against the flat of Grantaire's abdomen, to stay him, but something darker and deeper and more selfish altogether.

"Grantaire," Enjolras says, and then says it _again_. After the third time it becomes a rhythm, a measure for their bodies to move to; when Grantaire puts one hand in Enjolras's hair and says it back, Enjolras grapples for his free hand and holds it fast against the pillow. They come like this, close-paced, trading each other's names between their mouths.

Enjolras spreads, afterwards, mellow-boned and heavy on top of Grantaire. Grantaire pushes his fingers into his hair, loosens them from where they've pulled and held, and the sound Enjolras makes is deep and good. Later he lets his free hand rub circles across Enjolras's bare, sweaty back and shoulders, his skin a polished gold, almost russet where he moves, breathing. They slip in and out of awareness.

When Enjolras pushes back he pushes back into himself, too. He drives up on his elbow, pushing his hair out of his face, out of Grantaire's, and looks at him the way he's done the night before, when the two of them were half-asleep and barely moving against each other. 

Grantaire doesn't quite know how to navigate that moment, is tempted to prattle off into bad puns and something about Enjolras's lovely backside, but a look at Enjolras's face stops him. Even soft-mouthed and relaxed Enjolras is still steady, and his hand grasping Grantaire's hand against the pillow doesn't shake, only holds. 

Grantaire still isn't sure how this works — whether Enjolras has satisfied whatever curiosity has pushed him to take Grantaire to bed, or what kind of understanding he seems to have gotten from the experience. Translation can only take them so far.

It takes time. Eventually his tall proud body slackens just enough to come and kiss Grantaire, working his mouth open, and Grantaire pushes back, puts his free hand around the slope of his bare shoulder again. They shape out a different meaning between them, another language, an _argot_ of their own, forged out of physicality between grasping hands and clenching thighs. Prague will be this for years to come: Enjolras's open mouth against his, and all that warm skin pressed against Grantaire's chest, all the glory and treasures of the city packed down to this hotel room, this bed, the space they made between their mouths — and then, later, the bright open doorway to the bathroom, when Enjolras, stark naked and completely unconcerned, leaves the bed to take a shower.

**Author's Note:**

> \- _grand ange au front d'airain_ is from Baudelaire's poem [Je te donne ces vers](http://fleursdumal.org/poem/134). I can't help but feel that modern-day Grantaire would probably have Baudelaire's poetry on a constant loop in his head when Enjolras's around.
> 
> \- [Georges de La Tour](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_de_La_Tour), 17th century painter, famous, among other things, for his use of chiaroscuro — like [this](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Saint_Joseph_charpentier_%28La_Tour%29.jpg/438px-Saint_Joseph_charpentier_%28La_Tour%29.jpg), or [this](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/%27Saint_Sebastian_Tended_by_Irene%27%2C_attributed_to_Georges_de_La_Tour%2C_early_1630s%2C_oil_on_canvas%2C_Kimbell_Art_Museum.jpg). A lot of his paintings are in the Louvre and this version of Grantaire would most likely be very familiar with him.
> 
> \- Grantaire's _devotion only sounds right in Latin_ line comes from two different places — Horatio speaking to the Ghost in Latin in _Hamlet_ , and Sydney Carton's ~I am the Resurrection and the Life~ shtick in _A Tale of Two Cities_ , mostly because no one will ever convince me Grantaire isn't in parts based off of and a response to Carton's character. Apply tinhat firmly on, etc.
> 
> Happy holidays!


End file.
